Vulnerability in our DNA: the work of Lyndi Sales
by Michael Smith
Contemporary culture deals with the trauma of airplane crashes in a very
particular manner. Sense is imposed on the aberration that such events
represent, usually through the application of narratives onto the tragedies.
Yet, far from being truly therapeutic, such narratives usually involve predictable
binaries that are reductive. Director George Seaton’s 1970 film ‘Airport’, based
on a 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, adopted such an approach, tacking a plot about
a would-be terrorist onto his exploitative milking of extreme emotional situations.
The effect of Seaton’s film was not actually to provide an adequate and cathartic
explication of the emotional experience of such an awful event; rather the film
functioned, like its slew of imitators in the burgeoning ‘disaster’ genre, to package
trauma for palatable consumption by a global audience.
Similarly, Paul Greengrass’s 2006 docudrama ‘United 93’, a real-time account
of events on United Airlines Flight 93 (one of four planes hijacked by terrorists
in the USA on 11 September 2001) ultimately exists to affirm American heroism.
The film, the first Hollywood production to lasso the narratives of the terror
attacks of 9/11, tells the story of the crew and passengers on board this flight,
who banded together to resist their hijackers. Though their attempts were
unsuccessful, and the plane crashed into a field killing all 44 people on board,
the event and the film have become emblematic of a certain type of mythic
American ‘everyman’ valour in the face of the terrorist threat. Real or fabricated,
his serves as solace to the families of those killed. Order, momentarily disturbed
by threat from outside, is reestablished through the grafting of a traditional linear
plotline onto an event or series of occurrences that in fact defy neat assumptions
of good triumphing over evil.
The events around the SAA Helderberg aircraft disaster of 28 November 1987
saw a total of 159 people die. The subsequent trickle of information about this
tragedy to the public generally and to the families of the deceased specifically,
provided no such solace. The pall of opacity that still surrounds the Helderberg
Disaster was certainly not expelled by the Ministry of Transport’s Inquiry into
the crash: the Inquiry remained inconclusive, failing to ascertain the truth of a
variety of claims about the disaster. These included that the aircraft was
carrying flammable material in contravention of international prescripts, and
that the ZUR tape that kept a 24 hour record of flight information was
deliberately removed and possibly destroyed.
The culpability of the Apartheid government in the incident, primarily
suggested by Dr David Joseph Klatzow who alleged that “Armscor’s zeal” in
using the Helderberg to transport rocket fuel for the various wars in the
region resulted in the crash, was also not conclusively established.
The complexity that marks the work of contemporary South African artist Lyndi
Sales references the constellation of emotions around this terrible tragedy.
Sales’ father was one of the 159 people killed in the Helderberg Disaster;
the event happened when she was just fourteen years old. Much of Sales’
creative production as an adult artist has centered around the processes of
coming to terms with both the loss of her father, and a sense of helplessness
at the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the event.
Sales’ output inserts itself where the neatness of linear narratives and
polarising binaries of good guy/bad guy, good country/bad country fail. Her
installations and sculptures in paper, nylon, rubber and plastic physically
and visually figure confusion. The leitmotif of incision, which creates constant
interchange between negative and positive space and image, speaks
eloquently of loss, pain and trauma, yet also of a therapeutic type of
ownership of that trauma: Sales frequently transforms found objects such
as lottery tickets, aircraft life jackets and safety information cards from
aircraft seatbacks. Sales’ transfigured found objects are light years away
from slick, ironic‘readymades’: they seem instead to map out emotional
terrain of pain and perplexity. Often, they go further, becoming mini-
monuments to the transience of life, utilising flight as a metaphor for limbo
a moment of passing over between two states.
Limb, a work created from the nylon of a deconstructed life raft, expresses
a certain human frailty: the flimsy positive strands of nylon that make up the
shape of a leg are at once invoked and threatened by the negative shapes
of the cutout areas. The very act of incising into the nylon, which has called
into being the human limb, nullifies the function of the life raft, rendering it
incapable of sustaining human life in the limbo before rescue. The
fragmented leg floats decontextualised, all at sea, as it were.
How long can you hold your breath works in a similar way, but evidences a
greater interest in viscerality. The images carved into each side of a life
vest are the bronchial branches from the inside of human lungs. This links
Sales’ act of cutting with surgical incision, an invasive act of excavating
the body’s layers of skin and tissue, reinforcing the notion of the body’s
infinite fragility. In fact, Sales speaks of the these works as dealing with
the transference of solid form to something ethereal, matter to energy. This
links to ideas posited by the Nkisi figures of the lower Congo, into which nails
were hammered to release some of the power of the deity imaged. One
senses that each one of Sales’ incisions into the life jacket releases some
of the accumulated emotion associated with her experience.
The image of a human arm in the pair of Breathing Life works occurs in two
manifestations: once in life raft rubber, and once in lottery cards. This use
of Lotto (the brand name of South Africa’s state-endorsed lottery) cards
introduces Sales’ employment of the notion of chance:yet, paradoxically
the notion of good luck that attaches to lottery winning becomes reversed
as Sales references the popular wisdom that one is more likely to die in a
plane crash than one is to win the lottery, with somewhere in the region
of one in 11 million chances. In fact, 1 in 11 000 000 chances’ became
the title of her 2006/2007 xhibition at Bell-Roberts in Cape Town and
Gallery Momo in Johannesburg.
Yet this use of lottery cards has ramifications beyond the particular details
of Sales’ family tragedy: the lottery cruelly embodies the desperate hope
held by many impoverished South Africans that a stroke of good luck will
change their often tragic lives. Sales seems to suggest that, much like the
unseen forces that worked to inject trauma into her life, so too the
machinations of systems bigger than the individual seem to conspire to
limit the lot of the already disadvantaged.
A work entitled Flight Path is created from a series of safety cards.Given
the overarching subject of Sales’ work, Flight Path registers the futility of
these cards, with their measured language and images of oddly calm
passengers, in the face of very real and immediate crisis. Sales’ process
of carving out networks of shapes from these objects seems deliberately
perverse, denying the their communicative purpose in a manner that is
at once destructive and whimsical.
In a work entitled Shatter, Sales has carved an intricate radial
configuration out of 159 boarding passes, pieced together into a large
format circular shape. The final result is mandala-like in its meditative
aura: it operates like a sedate explosion, working out from a hollow
epicenter. Yet, even the most cursory thought into the function of a
boarding pass reveals how strategic Sales’ choices of found objects
with which to work are. On both domestic and international flights,
one’s pass is virtually like currency, the means through which
access to the plane is controlled and allowed. In Sales’ Shatter,
however, access to he Helderberg, symbolised by her use of the
same number of passes as there were people on board the plane,
takes on a simultaneously ominous and tragic tone.
In this work, the notion of interplay extends beyond the physical of the
negative and positive shapes, even beyond the existential concepts
of life and death, onto a strata that begins to interrogate the artistic
process. For Sales, artmaking is quite literally a superfine balance
between creation and destruction. The works she makes straddle a
divide between permanence and ephemerality, and seem to have a
strangely powerful vulnerability that is compelling.
As a result of its round perimeter, Shatter is the work by Sales that
seems most like it represents catharsis for the artist, as if the
processes of its creation allowed the derivation of a degree of peace.
Undoubtedly it is a peace that is hard-won: the uncertainty remains
virtually contained in the DNA of this image with its profusion of
shapes and blind alleys, and its creation unavoidably involved
constant, repetitious incision, to the point where the cards are very
near to states of collapse.
Yet one has to believe that this work, and in fact all of Sales’ work,
contains the means to a meaningful, useful conception of trauma
and healing. Like decal sheets from which all of the images have
been removed, her works are confounding, necessarily frustrating,
yet also endlessly evocative in the sense that what remains
behind poetically registers that which has been removed.
- January 2008
Michael Smith is a Johannesburg-based artist and writer, and works as Managing Editor for ArtThrob.